Wow, I just read all of these posts and it has just reinsured me of how naive the surfboard industry is! Hayden has created a product that is available to all shapers and surfers alike and not only is it locally made (for anyone that cares) but it allows other shapers to explore their shapes through a different construction....and reap all the benefits!!! I have surfed many different "technologies" of surf craft and FiberFlex is by far the best one I have put under my feet. I have a Hayden and a Lost FF and they are the best boards I have ever had!
My dad had a go of the Simon FF SUP and he is an experienced SUP rider and said "it definitely has spring!". Of course it is going to flex more than a custom PU board!! Why the hell is everyone so negative on the idea without even giving it a go!?!?!?! You can buy a custom shaped SUP board in Australia in a sick technology....one that is light and fast and has been approved by some great SUP surfers!! Why not give it a go?
This may not be the "be-all" technology but the construction is so easy yet no-one else but Hayden mastered it and made it available for all to try, Shapers included! And the best thing is it works!!!
Pull your stubborn heads out of the ground and give it a go! Change is good!
Yeeeeeeeew

CMC said...

I could really get started on this one. The windsurfer comments always get me going. I won't though, it's too nice a day outside.

Does a SUP flex? If you can flex it upside down on hard ground with 1 times gravity you would be surprised how many G's momentarily pass through a board in a turn. It's not how much the board flexes it's how it rebounds that you can or can't feel. Some boards feel alive, this is twang or rebound from the board and fins. If you don't think you are already feeling it make the same board twice with and without a stringer, make the same board again with a bamboo laminate. Then really kill it by making another and glassing it, putting a layer of divinycell, more glass and a kilo of car paint and see what happens. Your common sense tells you that these boards would all feel different. I think you are already feeling flex.

I was going to run the experiment of making the same board 3 times in 3 different constructions to demonstrate the differences of flex and performance, spoke to SUP World, had the materials and labour sponsored for free but never proceeded as the effort towards an apathetic market of people sold on mass produced boards really did not seem worth it.

Yeah good idea, we are considering same with a certain model (FF, Custom Epoxy w/stringer, Factory Epoxy sandwich). Would be interesting to get feedback - pity we couldn't blindfold the test pilot :-)

Nice video Casso getting tricky the corner gopro vid . Good surfing it crap conditions how does the board feel in the bumps , does it absorb the bumps more than a standard board or no real difference.

Rob

Just heard that Matt Grainger won the Manly Festival SUP contest. Riding an 8ft 10in Stand Sure Fibreflex - see, it must work

How is the little puppy going, anything you would change on dimensions ,how is it holding up?

My 12' big easy definately flexes - you can feel it shimmy shake when you go over the back of a wave.

Its thinnish and long. Funny, I have seen so many snapped ones now around the traps.... Always worried I was going to snap it. But it always seemed to cope with me, no matter what punishment I meted out to it. I liked it so much that I keep it for friends and family.

And that said, its one of the nicest surfing boards I have tried (albeit a bit wide and long for my taste these days). Definitely 'lively'. Should be more of it (lively that is), I reckon.

But getting 'lively' into a board must be a fine line - and highly dependent on the rider's weight and the characteristics of the board (length, thickness) to get just right?

Reminds me of my quest to get just the right amount of flex in my golf driver.... or why I loved my Dynamic VR27s.... its a highly personal thing.

Marvin said...

My 12' big easy definately flexes - you can feel it shimmy shake when you go over the back of a wave.

Its thinnish and long. Funny, I have seen so many snapped ones now around the traps.... Always worried I was going to snap it. But it always seemed to cope with me, no matter what punishment I meted out to it. I liked it so much that I keep it for friends and family.

And that said, its one of the nicest surfing boards I have tried (albeit a bit wide and long for my taste these days). Definitely 'lively'. Should be more of it (lively that is), I reckon.

But getting 'lively' into a board must be a fine line - and highly dependent on the rider's weight and the characteristics of the board (length, thickness) to get just right?

Reminds me of my quest to get just the right amount of flex in my golf driver.... or why I loved my Dynamic VR27s.... its a highly personal thing.

wrap your club in carbon as that makes stuff flex!

That is a beautiful board man! Simon is a master. How does it go in bigger stuff?

green menace said...

How is the board holding up and are you still riding this size casso?

The board is holding up great - not a single ding after heaps of punishment.

I've got a 8'5" as well now (same construction) - I wanted to pull the nose in a bit so it wouldn't catch on suckier waves. To pull the nose in and keep the same volume, I went a little longer. Everything else is similar except the 8'5" has a swallow tail.

Love them both. Ride the 8'5" in good waves and the 8'2" in fat waves.

CMC said...

Does a SUP flex? If you can flex it upside down on hard ground with 1 times gravity you would be surprised how many G's momentarily pass through a board in a turn. It's not how much the board flexes it's how it rebounds that you can or can't feel. Some boards feel alive, this is twang or rebound from the board and fins. If you don't think you are already feeling it make the same board twice with and without a stringer, make the same board again with a bamboo laminate. Then really kill it by making another and glassing it, putting a layer of divinycell, more glass and a kilo of car paint and see what happens. Your common sense tells you that these boards would all feel different. I think you are already feeling flex.

I was going to run the experiment of making the same board 3 times in 3 different constructions to demonstrate the differences of flex and performance, spoke to SUP World, had the materials and labour sponsored for free but never proceeded as the effort towards an apathetic market of people sold on mass produced boards really did not seem worth it.

This guy looks like he is running a cool experiment:

From: www.wired.com/playbook

One Surf Scientist's Quest for a Better Wave of Boards
By Erik Malinowski August 19, 2010

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have been donning their wet suits and hitting the waves this summer to see if an objective, data-centric standard can explain why some surfboards perform better than others.

Benjamin Thompson, who hails from small-town New Hampshire, has been leading the effort through his Ph.D. focus at the UCSD Department of Structural Engineering, zeroing in on the properties of composite fibers and how they specifically relate to surfboards. Thompson's ultimate goal is to see if surfboards have something called “optimal flexibility,” a perfect point at which a board bends enough for a certain surfer.

“There's two schools of thought in surfing,” Thompson told Wired.com. “Some think that the board should be as rigid as possible. Some think that flex is the most important thing ever. What I'm trying to do is develop an objective way to define performance.”

For Thompson, who's been engulfed in this quest for two years now, it stems from a personal frustration with hearing accolades from friends about how a great a board was, only to find out that his experience didn't match up. “It's not like golf, where you can see how many yards the ball went and determine how good to club is. I'd have friends drop $600 on a new board because someone said it was sick, and my first thought was always, 'Well, how do you really know that?'”

So this summer, Thompson, armed with a team of enthusiastic UCSD undergrads, set out to brave the chilly waters north of San Diego for some actual in-wave testing. Thompson's prototypical system utilized eight sensors and an on-board microprocessor that collected data and, aside from storing it locally on a memory card, relayed it to an on-shore laptop.

The data gathered in this initial experimentation wasn't enough to draw any conclusions, Thompson says, but it did help in determining how future trials and prototypes might be rendered. For example, Thompson plans to deploy a board this fall that will be affixed with 50-odd sensors and mechanisms, including accelerometers, strain transducers and gyroscopic instrumentation. Thompson now knows, based on the initial tests, that the data set would be too large to transmit via radio waves to the on-shore computer, so the plan is to outfit the board with a removable flash drive that should be able to collate the entire data set without issue.

After the surfer has completed their run, they'll be interviewed and their analysis with be matched up with specific data points, in the same way a polygraph administrator would pair up lies told with spikes in the chart. “That's when we hope to finally correlate human performance with hard data,” he says.

“I always hear so many contradictions from people about which board is better and for whom,” Thompson said. “It's not that what they're saying is wrong. It's just not given enough context. You don't know about wave conditions or a person's body type, and that's what we're bringing into the equation.”

Casso said...

green menace said...

How is the board holding up and are you still riding this size casso?

The board is holding up great - not a single ding after heaps of punishment.

I've got a 8'5" as well now (same construction) - I wanted to pull the nose in a bit so it wouldn't catch on suckier waves. To pull the nose in and keep the same volume, I went a little longer. Everything else is similar except the 8'5" has a swallow tail.

Love them both. Ride the 8'5" in good waves and the 8'2" in fat waves.

Here they both are for comparative purposes: